Date: Wednesday, 4 March 2020
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Laura Diaz Anadon
Talk Title: “The role of government policy to incentivise technology innovation to meet the climate change challenge”
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College

The next St Catharine’s Political Economy Seminar in the series on the Economics of Austerity, will be held on 4 March 2020. Professor Laura Diaz Anadon will give a talk on “The role of government policy to incentivise technology innovation to meet the climate change challenge”. The seminar will be held in the Ramsden Room at St Catharine’s College from 6.00-7.30 pm. All are welcome. The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Speaker:
Laura Diaz Anadon is Professor of Climate Change Policy at the University of Cambridge. She joined the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG) at the Department of Land Economy in September 2017 after a year in the Department in Politics and International Studies and three years as an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Professor Anadon is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) Working Group on Climate Mitigation. She was selected as a member of the Innovation Caucus to advise INNOVATE UK, and has engaged with policymakers throughout the world. She has also contributed to UN, IEA, EU, World Bank and OECD reports. The recipient of many awards and scholarships, including the Fundacion Banco Sabadell Award for the Best Spanish Economics researcher under 40 in 2018. Professor Anadon sits on various editorial boards, including the Nature Energy.

Talk Overview:
Professor Diaz Anadon’s research cuts across traditional disciplines, aiming to help governments to make effective technology choices, develop impactful policies and build institutions which tackle climate change. Her team researches energy and environment-oriented technological innovation, identifying and quantifying the diverse benefits that derive from policies designed to promote it; mapping the complex factors that contribute to it; and creating tools for policymakers and analysts to manage the systemic uncertainties that accompany it. Professor Diaz Anadon will discuss her research on public innovation institutions in the climate and energy space, which has included in-depth studies in the United States, China and India. She will discuss the extent to which, empirically, different types of R&D funding mechanisms, partnerships with cleantech startups, and deployment subsidies for renewable energy have led to better low carbon energy technologies, new capabilities, and new firm growth opportunities. She will discuss how can we build and resource effective, empowered institutions able to tackle climate change more rapidly in a changing world in terms of industrial competitiveness, with a particular role on the role of China.

Please contact the seminar organisers Philip Arestis (pa267@cam.ac.uk) and Michael Kitson (mk24@cam.ac.uk) in the event of a query